Auch unter optimalen Bedingungen gibt es keine absolut sichere Suizidprävention. Dennoch gibt es Standards, die im psychiatrischen Krankenhaus hilfreich sind. Dazu gehören die Herstellung einer hilfreichen und fürsorglichen Beziehung unter der Mitarbeit des Patienten, die Diagnostik und adäquate psychotherapeutische und medikamentöse Therapie der Grunderkrankung sowie die Regelung von engmaschiger Betreuung, Ausgang und Besuch.
Suicide prevention is a central topic of psychiatry and psychotherapy. Times of changes in psychiatric inpatient treatment conceptions usually come along with an increase of psychopathology and with increasing suicide rates in psychiatric hospitals to, like seen in the seventies and eighties of last century in Germany. After a real increase of inpatient suicides during those years the number and rate of inpatient suicides decreased from about 280 of 100 000 admissions of patients in 1980 to about 50 in 2014. Young male schizophrenic patients were identified as the new high risk group despite the severely depressed patients with delusions as a traditional high risk group. Nowadays suicide prevention is part of all educational programs in psychiatry and psychotherapy.
